Naked
By David Sedaris
Cover design by Chip Kidd
Little, Brown, 1997

In Naked’s title story David Sedaris recounts his stay in a nudist colony – a nudist trailer court in rural Pennsylvania, actually – inhabited by people whose display of saggy flesh is as worrying as their desire to bare it. Returning home, Sedaris feels that he can see people’s bodies through their clothes, something he had fantasised about as a boy when he ordered a pair of X-ray glasses from a comic book. As an adult, however, X-ray vision no longer seems so desirable.